07/27/05

Last night, without any prior warning (unlike previous times), my other Internet hosting provider took my site (and all the other shared hosted sites) down to do a hard drive replacement.

Then thing went from bad to worse. Apparently last week, when doing their monthly maintenance they noticed that the drive had failed and the mirror was now also failing. So, they scheduled a dual drive replacement. Only problem is the data center did the replacement in the wrong order and...destroyed the 'backup'.

Apparently, daily backups means RAID1? Because, now their only option was to restore from offsite backups....which are only done quarterly, so they restored the system to "May 2005".

I can kind of accept the website loss, the bulk of that website is static content and I have copies of all that...the big changes in May and onward were my vacation pictures and I had started updating my resume. Well, and the removal of my guestbook, which was mainly just attracting spam. But, it was around that time that I started a photoblog....

At least I did a dump before I went on vacation last month...so only two entires were lost, one I made while on vacation and one since then.

Though the disruption to Email was much more annoying. I'm dying from the lack of it, and being that I'm in the active job hunt stage....I'm depending on it heavily. And, I had apparently made some setup changes since May, inaddition to the ones I remember. So, I'm anxious to get in there and get that working again.

Related to email, was I had started a mailing list to try to keep in touch with my fellow co-workers that were also all laid off last week. Perhaps I'll host a group somewhere else for that....

Apparently, that hosting provider had contracted out datacenter operations to another company 2 years ago....which I remember vaguely as when they moved to new hardware (kind of good), but broke all my Perl scripts....require me to figure out enough PHP to get things working again.

Meanwhile, just to further compound things....a few hours later, I lose access to this site...apparently some kind of network issue. Which is good, because I don't think I could handle data loss with this site. I should probably plan to make some personal backups. But, I depend on this site a bit more, because the email that I've been apply to jobs with is hosted here.

Can't say I really experience either of these stages. Perhaps it was just the way things happened or something.

The next ones are Anger and Depression.

Well, depression is a natural thing for me to experience, so that's probably what happened...jumped all the earlier stages to get to it. It'll probably stick around for a very long time, though I'm hopeful that I'll be able to manage it....Hope incidentally is the next stage after depression. Though I don't think I've really entered it until I find more to be hopeful for.

The hard thing is most of my normal coping mechanisms are taken a hit by this specific cause. Hiding from it at work, or doing some shop therapy, are kind of restricted by my current situation. Though I was planning to get a haircut today, so I should try to still do that...so maybe at least my mood won't show as much.

After hope comes Acceptance. Which I suppose has always been something I've had a hard time with. It wasn't until I was set at working at Open Text after my previous layoff that I full accepted all of it.

"And acceptance is the answer to *all* my problems. today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation---some fact of my life---unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake..."

07/21/05

I had thought it was comical watching the photographer on the Sun Princess constantly looking down at her Nikon D1X's LCD after each shot or so.

I suppose over time, I'll develop or use this trait. But, I'm still old school where I just shoot lots of pictures and see later if I got the good one. And, sometimes a day or two would go by before I knew if I snapped the good one onto film.

The closest exception, would be the fact that my Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ2 doesn't have an optical viewfinder....so I have to look at the LCD and sometimes I turn the autoreview back on. The default is for it to be on, but it is one of the features I automatically turn off because I want to maximize the speed at which I can fire away at in the quest to get that money shot.

Now instead of subjecting some poor random forum to a long rambling thought, I will try to consolidate those things into this blog where they can be more easily ignored profess to be collected thoughts from my mind.